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Le bestiaire, ou Cortège d'Orphée, FP15a

Introduction

Apollinaire, a great bibliophile, knew all about the exquisitely illustrated medieval bestiaries; in 1906 his friend Picasso had made some experimental woodcuts of animals. He published eighteen of the eventual thirty poems in 1908 in a review, La phalange, and promised his readers an illustrated edition. Picasso, ever elusive, was otherwise engaged; the poet persuaded Raoul Dufy (whom he had met through Derain, illustrator of Apollinaire’s first work) to provide the artwork, the first of that artist’s many illustrations. Apollinaire casts himself as Orpheus in this work in poems 1, 13, 18 and 24 (all of which are ignored by Poulenc). The work was an artistic triumph and commercial disaster for its authors.

As he was leaving for war service in 1918 Adrienne Monnier handed Poulenc a packet of books which included a later edition of Apollinare’s work. The composer had already heard the poet read his lyrics, and he fell in love with them, selecting twelve to set to music in Pont-sur-Seine where he found himself stationed.

Having set these twelve poems to music, Poulenc reduced the number to six on the advice of Georges Auric. On learning that Louis Durey, fellow-member of Les Six, was working at the same time on setting the entire collection, Poulenc rather gallantly dedicated his own set to Durey.

The poems Poulenc chose for his published Le bestiaire were numbers 10, 4, 17, 19, 22 and 23 of Apollinaire’s collection.

Recordings

Graham Johnson is simply the greatest living authority on French song; an artist whose innate feeling for the music is combined with prodigious scholarship. Following his many wonderful recordings in Hyperion’s French Song Edition, Johnson turns t ...» More

Le dromadaire, with its marvellous left hand, a less than nimble quintuplet falling to the bass, brilliantly suggests a dour fleet of haunch-rolling dromedaries galumphing through the sands of the world. According to the source of Apollinaire’s story, Gomez de Santistevan, the journey took three years and four months (via Norway and Babylon) but Poulenc keeps the song mercifully short and to the point. The song is a minor relation of Schubert’s Die Forelle where a simple piano figuration drawn from nature becomes a memorable motif. The melody of the interlude is a slow-motion variation of the beginning of the Farandole of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne. The tiny perky postlude, whoopla in deadpan manner, betrays Poulenc’s own delight in the solemn scenario.

La chèvre du Thibet is a love song in disguise with Jason’s Golden Fleece failing to match the infinite value of the beloved’s hair. The piano interlude in bars 4–5 of the song skips rather heavily, goat-like, across the bar lines. The closing cadence shows that Poulenc already knows how to write music of genuine tenderness.

In La sauterelle the grasshopper of the wilderness, ennobled by its culinary link with John the Baptist, is the perfect match for the mock-snobbism of Apollinaire, whose self-parodying fastidiousness regarding the social niveau of his readers is perfectly captured by the heady, oscillating tones at the end of the song. Poulenc seldom set a baritone more of a challenge in head-voice than in these two bars, right on the ‘break’.

Le dauphin gambols joyfully in the sea, a creature clever and good-natured enough to be a stand-in for Poulenc himself who made something of a splash with this cycle. The composer may not yet be roi de la mélodie française (Fauré and Ravel are still alive) but with this music he unexpectedly proves himself heir-presumptive—the dauphin in fact.

L’écrevisse paints to perfection the forward-sideways-and-backwards movement of a crayfish, now a rising motif in the treble clef, now a descending one in the bass. The use of portato in the voice for ‘À reculons’ is an early sign of this composer’s feeling for vocal sensuousness (as is also the setting of ‘mélancolie’ at the close of the next song).

La carpe is, in some ways, the masterpiece of the set although so little happens. The sadness of these large fish, moving sluggishly in the pond’s depths, their movement giving rise only to tiny ripples on the surface, is caught in a single page of such atmosphere that, once heard, it is never forgotten. The set is so successful because the voice of Apollinaire, commenting in this allusive charivari of animals with tender seriousness and sincerity (in the manner of the makers of the first medieval bestiaries), is in tune with Poulenc’s. This member of the jeunesse doré is amusing, chic, naughty, self-consciously modern, an artistic snob, but this young man undeniably has a heart.